


Memento Mortuus Eras

by catie_writes_things



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Ghosts, Guest appearances by a couple saints, Memento mori, Spiritual
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-21
Updated: 2017-10-21
Packaged: 2019-01-20 17:44:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12438243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/catie_writes_things/pseuds/catie_writes_things
Summary: Just another day in the life: Jason visits a grave, sees ghosts, and cracks a couple jokes. He’s a morbid sort of guy, but not always in the way people think.





	Memento Mortuus Eras

**Author's Note:**

  * For [iamfitzwilliamdarcy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/iamfitzwilliamdarcy/gifts).



It was a crisp autumn morning, and Jason woke up early, by the standards of Wayne Manor’s inhabitants. The air was cool and still. Bright yellow sunbeams poked through the curtains. It was peaceful.

The bearded man in the burial shroud standing at the foot of his bed wasn’t smiling. But then, he never did. Instead, he raised one ghostly arm and beckoned, silently but inexorably, like every morning.

“Yeah, alright, I’m getting up,” Jason grumbled, the lingering fog of sleep thoroughly banished. He pushed back the deliciously warm covers and swung his bare feet down onto the cold floor, sitting up. “Happy now?”

But the man was gone.

“Of course not,” Jason said to the empty room. “He won’t let me rest until I’m dead. Again.”

* * *

He went for a run around the manor’s grounds. There was a breeze picking up, scattering brown and gold leaves across his path. He ran through the gardens and around the south lawn without encountering another soul.  His pace slowed to a jog as his path took him towards to Wayne family plot, where he knew at least one soul would meet him.

It wasn’t that strange, all things considered, to see ghosts in graveyards. Being affiliated with Batman meant dealing with weirder on a weekly basis. But, if you were going to see a spirit hanging around a grave, you’d expect it to belong to the body buried in it.

Then again, this was an unusual grave, for it didn’t have a body in it, anymore.

He’d asked Bruce, in one of their terse conversations that passed for a heart-to-heart, to leave the headstone, though he figured Bruce probably would have anyway. It just felt right. He  _ had _ died, after all.

So the stone remained, and he slowed from a jog to a walk as he approached it on this bright morning.  _ Here Lies Jason Todd, Beloved Son _ . He supposed it was haunted, just by his being there. “If ghosts are dead people who insist on sticking around,” he mused out loud, “Then I’m the best damn ghost there ever was.”

An honest-to-god robin chose that moment to alight on his headstone, because the very notion of subtlety had been banished from the house and grounds of Wayne Manor long ago. And with that omen, his fellow haunter appeared.

She looked about ten years old, maybe a little older. She was dressed all in white, a bouquet of lilies in one arm, and a knife held in the other hand. But she held the knife the way a storybook princess might hold a scepter, not as a weapon, but as a sign of honor, gripped by the blade without damaging her delicate hand.

“Why don’t you go find your own grave to haunt?” he taunted the apparition. “This one’s mine.”

She laughed, a sound almost like music, though it did nothing to disturb the quiet peace of the morning. She was the only one who ever laughed at his morbid jokes.

“Seriously, you don’t belong here,” he insisted.

“Neither do you,” she replied with a teasing smile.

Jason sighed and rolled his eyes heavenward. “Right,” he said. “Restless until we go to our eternal rest, or something like that. Well, last time I tried that, it turned out not to be so eternal.”

The apparition was gone, but he still heard the echo of her laughter.

* * *

He finished his run around the grounds and entered the cave through the waterfall. Bruce was already down there, or maybe still down there, engrossed in work on the computer - but not so engrossed that he didn’t spare a monosyllabic acknowledgement of Jason’s presence. Jason returned the greeting, but his own attention was elsewhere as well.

There was another ghost in the cave, one Bruce didn’t see - or if he did, it was different for him, maybe. A young boy, twelve years old, trying on Dick’s old Robin costume for the first time, doing somersaults and grinning like his birthday and Christmas had come all at once.

“This is the best day of my life!” the boy exclaimed.

Bruce closed out of the files he was looking at and turned around in the chair to face Jason properly. “Good run?” he asked.

Jason gave his father half a smile, then looked back at his own ghost.

“Yeah,” he said, “it was.”


End file.
